"The 33"-Road Bike RacingWe set this forum up for our members to discuss their experiences in either pro or amateur racing, whether they are the big races, or even the small backyard races. Don't forget to update all the members with your own race results.

both of those would get me sick, so i choose c, continue a long on my not training enough to be a contender in a race and then make excuses like "my wife just had a baby" to my teammates training plan.

OP, this is the main (yet often under-appreciated) benefit of a power meter: the ability to quantify your training load. Each day's workout produces a certain training stress called training stress score (TSS). There's your chronic training load (or CTL, defined to be the moving exponential average of TSS of a long period, usually last 42days) and acute training load (or ATL, the moving exponential average of TSS of short period, usually last 7 days). If you are not mathematically inclined, the CTL basically changes very slowly as the stress of previous training counts more than the stress from your latest, while the opposite is true for ATL. You want to ramp your CTL at a steady, yet not too rapid fashion. Furthermore, there's something called training stress balance, which is CTL-ATL. Once this value gets too negative, people either overreach, overtrain, burn out, or get sick.

So without knowing how much you were training (which given your access to a PM, should be quantified using the terms above), none of us can help you judge these things. For most of us, 28 hours of base represents such a sudden rise in ATL (remember, CTL ramps slowly) that it would mean the TSB dips way low, causing burnouts, illness, or both. Not to beat a dead horse, but this is why when you mentioned you use a PM, i suggested you get that book. Using info from the book, you soon realize that there's a typical TSS associated with each type of workouts, and there are calculators out there (Wattage Forum) that will allow you to plan your weekly training load and see how your CTL and TSB change, thus allowing you to structure your training to you can put in the most amount of work possible without burning out.